Wind Power from Brian Potter - my takeaways.
Construction Physics is my newly discovered favourite Substack in which its brilliant author, Brian Potter, delves into complicated topics of technology, economics, and tech history.
He read many sources to present us with the history of wind power in 2022 (pt. 2, pt. 3), and I'm going to digest it here, and also try to add some new context from 2025.
The state of wind power in 2025
Let's start by looking at how much energy we generate with wind here in Europe. Ember has a great electricity data explorer.
Wind in the EU is now the second source of electricity generation, with 480 TWh generated in 2024. The first place is still held by nuclear, with 648 TWh.
If we want to look at the installed capacity comparing different countries, Our world in data provides a good overview. It's not hard to see that China is by far the leader with installed capacity almost as twice that of the EU.
The data in the chart only shows up to the year 2023, but we also have data for 2024.
We know that in 2024, China had installed the wind power capacity of 521 gigawatts.
In the US, in 2024 the total installed capacity is actually fell down from 150 GW in 2023 to 136 GW in 2024. So there is a slight decline here. I couldn't find any analysis as to why that happened.
Now let's turn to history.
The humble beginnings
Throughout most of the 20th century wind power struggled to compete with cheaper sources of energy. If you want to improve the tech, and make it cheaper, you have to get to a certain point of scale. But scale was limited due to abundance of cheap electric energy from other sources, mostly hydroelectric and thermal - (coal, oil, gas).
So the advances in the technology led to the price of wind power generation begin to fall only in the 1980s. We'll get to that later. But first, let's see how it started.
The first individual turbines started appearing at the end of the 19th century. Several companies across Europe were trying to commercialise wind generation before WWI, but to no avail.
Denmark was one of the first pioneers thanks to Poul la Cour, who built its turbines in Denmark, and also wrote a book about the technology, spreading the knowledge. Denmark will continue to be the leader in wind generation.
After WWI, research continues, and design slowly improves. Across the glove companies start using twisted-airfoil shaped blades.
In 1919, a German physicist, Albert Bets publishes the so-called Betz Limit - a throretical limit for the wind turbine to the energy the can be extracted from the wind, which is 16/27.
Post-WWII development was again pretty slow, and companies were again sent out of business by cheaper electricity alternatives. Nevertheless, there were significant design improvements: passive stall techniques to regulate turbine speed, and the usage of fibreglass blades.
New start
In the early 1970s the world saw the rise of the environmental movement. Naturally, wind power became more appealing. Plus the oil crisis of 1973 made oil prices jump 4x (from $3 to $12 per barrel), and thus many countries started looking at securing their energy supplies. So the governments started pouring money into R&D.
Several turbines were developed in 1970s and 1980s by NASA, GE, and Boeing with max capacity 3.2MW. Similar government-led R&D happened in EU. Again they fell to be economically successful.
However, finally it was clear that a common design started to emerge with the latest advances making it more robust and resilient.
The newly design improvement included:
Variable speed turbines, which allows to capture more energy by adjusting its speed to the wind.
Fibreglass blades: fibreglass is strong enough, and much more lightweight than the metal
Advances in computational methods have made it easier to predict and calculate wind turbine performance
Multi-megawatt turbines means less space is required, less things that can break, better economics
Vestas
The danish company Vestas is one of the world's leaders in making the wind turbines.
In the 1970s and 1980s they were making smaller ones, from 30 - 55 kW. Starting in 1978, with
In 1978 the introduction of National Energy Act has been passed; it gave 10% tax credits. On top of that California added 25%. Thus, building wind turbines in California became very lucrative. By 1986 96% of the world's wind-generated electricity was being generated in California. A big portion of turbines coming to CA was Danish. Suddenly, Vestas had a large market. With oil prices collapsed, governments lost interests in incentivising the wind power.
Europe started growing as well. By 2000, 70% of wind was being generated in Europe. While US mostly stayed flat.
Size matters
Finally, as large-enough scale was reached, prices started to fall.
~74% from 1984 to 2014, and another 32% between 2014 and 2019.
Why such dramatic change? Mostly because a long history of innovations accumulated and reached its critical mass. One of the major factors was the size of the turbines.
Higher turbines get access to steadier and faster winds, and the wind energy rises with the cube of windspeed. While longer blades catch more wind energy.
The early turbines of the 1980s were 50-100 kW, and 15 meter tall. Nowadays turbines are easily above 100m height, generating multiple MWs of energy.
The offshore Vestas V236, for example, has a hub height of 145 meters and a rotor with a diameter of 236 meters.
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